Bruised Buildings
Jeff Williams
May 4th - June 1st, 2024
Open Hours: Saturdays 12-6pm
5419 Glissman Rd, Austin, TX 78702
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 4th, 7-11pm
"Our neighbor was built in 2008, a 6-story, Styrofoam and stucco colossal residential complex that fills three city lots and refers to itself as a Castle. It’s shaped like the letter U with 2BR/1BA wrapped on all sides, each room marked by a decorative balcony. The Castle provides its residents with a gym, woodshop, screening room, recording studio, and rooftop events. When the Castle was built, a century’s long view of the city skyline was obstructed. Our building is an all-brick 3-story from the 1900s, named Nine Arches for the decorative stones adorning the top. The Arches provides its tenants with a lived history, once serving as a stable for the fire department, home to Superfly Auto Repair, and more recently as concrete cisterns for aquaculture. The rooftop of Nine Arches was covered in a large tarp, weighed down with plywood, 2x4s, and loose urban effects. On September 16th, 2010, at 4:45 pm, a tornado swept through the area, knocking down trees and transferring garbage from one street to the next. Extreme winds from the tornado carried under the tarp and launched weaponized construction materials into the foam stucco facade of the Castle. On the east side of the building, 4 stories up, an 18-inch span of the exterior corner was gouged, like the Nine Arches repeatedly took a cleaver to its edge. That damage is there to this day, 14 years later. So is an imprint of a wood plank, smashed flat, just missing the windows above and below. And there is the unmistakable dent of our skylight, which traveled 50ft on the wind before colliding with the penthouse wall. In defiance, the Castle poorly dressed its wounds with more foam, which does not age well in the sun. Now, when we look toward the city all we see are bruises from the attack that never healed.”
Co-Lab Projects is pleased to present Bruised Buildings, an exhibition of new sculpture and photography by Jeff Williams. The exhibition brings together three different series of artworks to form an installation in the Culvert Gallery. The first is a suite of photographs and accompanying text that documents an actual event where the building Williams lives in inadvertently attacked its neighbor during the fall of 2010. The photographs document significant damage to the facade of a colossal residential complex.
Adjacent to these photographs are a series of sculptural jackets. Each jacket is made from a rubber mold of an architectural structure and is detailed with imprints that include welded seams, structural rungs, access panels, dents, and accreted dirt. New versions will be made on-site with fresh architectural casts of the culvert. The pattern for each jacket is taken from thrift stores that serve the tenants of the Castle, where there is a variety of styles from sleeveless denim to fur collar coats. Williams has used casting rubber in his sculptures since 1999, following a brief stint working as a practical effects fabricator for haunted houses and B movies.
Lastly, a series of welded aluminum thrift store sculptures, mainly cookware, is included in the mix. Pizza pans are held in formation with one continuous welded line. Due to the thin gauge of the metal, the welding process oscillates between fusing the metal and cutting it apart. In Bruised Buildings, the exhibition shifts from exterior to interior, from photographs of a facade to the cookware found within. Every construction contains a record of the time it was built, projecting a lasting message of its design. Williams is interested in these messages for their direct relationship with the larger fractures and shifts of governmental, economic, and cultural powers, as they often erode faster than the buildings that house them.
Williams has been awarded residencies at the Dora Maar House, Menerbes, France; Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA, Recess in New York, NY; Galería Perdida, Chilchota, Michoacán, Mexico; and the Core Program in Houston, TX. He was the 2009 Leonore Annenberg Fellow in the Arts at the American Academy in Rome. Williams is a recent recipient of an NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship for Environmental Structures and a Santo Foundation Award. Solo projects and exhibitions include Jack Hanley Gallery, New York, NY; RAIR in Philadelphia, PA; 1708 Gallery in Richmond, VA; AMOA/Arthouse in Austin, TX, and Artpace, San Antonio, TX. Group exhibitions include International Objects, Brooklyn, NY; Et al Gallery, San Francisco, CA; NADA on Governors Island, NY; Museum of Fine Arts Houston; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; and Lora Reynolds Gallery in Austin, TX. Articles and reviews include The New York Times, Art in America, Art Papers, Blouin Modern Painters, Shifter Magazine, and Hyperallergic.
Materials for the exhibition are funded in part by a Special Research Grant, The University of Texas at Austin, where Williams is an Associate Professor of Sculpture and Extended Media.
This project is supported in part by grants from the Cultural Arts Division of the City of Austin Economic Development Department, Texas Commission on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts.